AWS must fork out $30.5M after losing P2P network patent scrap

No one really wins when a troll, sorry, assertion entity scores a victory

A Delaware jury has determined that Amazon Web Services infringed two networking patents and now owes the current patent holder $30.5 million. 

The jury returned its decision [PDF] on Friday, finding that AWS' CloudFront content delivery network ripped off two 2000-era patents (US 6714966 and 6732147) originally developed by Boeing but now owned by Acceleration Bay, an outfit described by its founder as "an incubator and investor" that "creates ventures based on inventions by large multinational corporations." 

Amazon was found to have not only infringed the two patents, but also done so willfully, which could lead to enhanced damages, potentially including trebling, depending on the court's final judgment next month. On the other hand, the internet giant's cloud service alone brings in about $9 billion in operating profit a quarter so we're sure it can afford even a hundred million to make this go away.

"Acceleration Bay is really appreciative for the jury and the judge for their service in the case," company president Joe Ward told The Register. "We believe the willful infringement was the right outcome and a win for inventors."

The patents that AWS was determined to have infringed both involve methods of streamlining data delivery across a network, seemingly in a peer-to-peer manner. The '966 patent "is generally directed towards systems providing an information delivery service using a regular network," the complaint [PDF] stated, "but sending data through neighbor participants."  

The '147 patent, meanwhile, "is generally directed towards methods and systems for leaving a broadcast channel … by sending messages to a second computer, so that the second computer can connect to a third computer to maintain a regular network," per the complaint. A peer-to-peer network focused on broadcasting information to many nodes, basically.

The combination of patents alleged in the suit, which included three others that weren't listed in the jury instructions, allows for the creation of an "m-regular, incomplete network" between nodes that is designed to reduce congestion when there are a large number of connections. By incomplete, they mean the info can flow around broken or slow connections.

Acceleration Bay gave an example of this setup:

For example, in a 5-regular network, a participant sends a message to its five neighbors each of which forward the message to their own neighbors, thus rapidly distributing the message over even a large network. Data will still be rapidly delivered, even if individual connections fail or operate slowly, because of the alternative pathways formed by the network, i.e. each neighbor is the start of a potential path to all other participants.

This structure is also flexible, allowing for participants to be added and dropped while the network is operating.

Yeah.

Technology like that is used in a lot of places, we imagine, including online gaming. Acceleration Bay has been especially litigious in that latter space, having recently won $23.4 million in damages from Activision Blizzard after asserting the gamemaker used two of its patents (including the '147 patent) to enable multiplayer elements of the Call of Duty series of shooters and World of Warcraft, its venerable online RPG. 

That said, Acceleration Bay has also lost cases asserting some of the very same patents at issue in the AWS and Activision matters, with a judge dismissing similar arguments against Electronic Arts and Take-Two Interactive in 2022 and 2020, respectively. 

In a blog post announcing Take-Two's victory, lawyers for the Grand Theft Auto and NBA 2K maker described Acceleration Bay as a "patent assertion entity" - a nice way of saying "patent troll" - and noted the judge ruled it didn't use the network topology patents that Acceleration Bay claimed it did.

Acceleration Bay made similar video game-related arguments in its AWS case, accusing Amazon of using its patents without permission in the creation of gaming products including Lumberyard, Luna, O3DE, Twitch, Gamelift, and Gridmate. Other Amazon products Acceleration Bay said infringed its patents included AWS more generally: EC2, EKS, CloudFront, VPC Peering, App Mesh, and Lambda. Only CloudFront was mentioned in the jury verdict. 

Amazon argued that its various technologies worked differently than the patents owned by Acceleration Bay, and that it had permission from Boeing to use the patents in the case. Amazon has so far not commented on the trial's outcome. ®